Yes, but what I mean is that the two (Sometimes three) sleeper carriages that make up the Fort William train come from only one half of the Highland sleeper - With each half consisting of a lounge car, seated car and six sleeper cars. The remaining carriages in that half of the sleeper continue on to only one of the other two destinations, I cannot remember which.
Thanks for that, you have fully satisfied my curiosity!
That doesn't seem likely when the opening of HS2 (Particularly the second phase) can probably be expected to sound the death knell for the Scottish Sleepers, the Lowland services in particular. At it's most optimistic £100 million would barely cover the cost of an entirely new fleet of rolling stock, whereas it does provide sufficient funding for quite a high quality refurbishment that should serve to spin out the lives of the carriages into the late 2020s.
This really does seem like a very sensible way forward.
The pod-style seat used on planes is very well developed and I've been fortunate enough to fly in the expensive seats a few times. There are a number of different types but all of them offer comfort, entertainment and decent sleep.
They are effectively off the shelf components and are easy to source competitively - a nice way to get a good price. It really wouldn't matter what they were installed into. It could be a MK3 shell, a new IEP body shell or anything else without 1/3 & 2/3 doors. I really do see this as a way to get a cost effective sleeper system without the need for vast capital costs.
Of course, such pods are usable as seats. This would allow a far better utilisation of stock. A diagram could be:
Glasgow (late pm) to London (early am)
London (9am) to Manchester / Liverpool / Birmingham as a luxury service
& the return working
London 5pm again to one of the other cities
London (late pm) to Glasgow
(And of course there's the opportunity for some daytime services within Scotland)
This seems to be a far better use of the stock than having it sat unused between 9am and 10pm.
There's the business model - anyone got a few £million to back my tender for the service?
Jason
If you want cheap, there's always the coach services.
The vast majority have now been disposed of. Scotrail have recently acquired one spare sleeper vehicle, the former Cargo-D owned sleeper, Porterbrook have one off-lease sleeper carriage remaining and Arriva now own a further two. There are eight further sleeper carriages at Long Marston that are stored in such a poor condition that they are currently awaiting disposal.
Given that what spare sleeper carriages there are have, mostly, been out of service for many years and stored in the open air, they probably have far, far greater corrosion problems than the active mark 3 sleepers, and I doubt that it is restricted to the toilet areas.
Replacing the mark 2 lounge cars with mark 3 vehicles would be interesting, as this would require some sort of reformation of the trains, as there is not another 12 metres of space available to the Caledonian Sleepers within the platform length at Euston to accommodate the additional, longer mark 3 carriages.
